Friday September 17th. Billy and Rachel got on the train to London. The concert was everything they hoped it would be. They slept out in the park. They had their alibis and no one would ever have known if they’d followed through the original plan. But they were teenagers, right? Somewhere on Sunday the wheels came off. They decided to do some sightseeing and as part of their adventure they fell into company with some punks. Now bear in mind punk was barely even a thing in those days. And somehow these punks persuaded Billy and Rachel that they had to stay on and go to the 100 Club. They stayed. They went. Rachel was not impressed. Billy was. They fell out over it. It was their first big argument. The bands on show included Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Clash and the Sex Pistols. It was the very birth of punk and it was nearly the end of Billy and Rachel. In more ways than one. She walked out. He followed her. But he wasn’t happy about it.

They got a train home first thing Monday, by which time the alarm had firmly been raised in school. Both sets of parents were distraught. The police were called. Doobs cracked under the pressure. He told that they’d gone to London to see Queen. The police thought he was being facetious (they didn’t know Doobs). ‘Gone to London to see the Queen, laddie?’ they asked ‘what d’you take us for?’ And it all came out. They turned back up on the Monday afternoon and the police met them at the station. They were both frogmarched back to their respective parents. Grounded ad infinitum.

Strangely, no one even asked if they’d had sex. Not the girls anyway. Rachel was older than us and it wasn’t the kind of thing we felt we could ask her. We waited for the rumours to spread from the boys. Which they didn’t. We just assumed Billy had sworn the boys to secrecy and that Doobs, Stevie and Scooby felt bad enough about having been the unwitting cause of his being caught, not to tell. Though I find it hard to imagine they could have been that restrained – it wasn’t in their teenage natures. But it became the big unanswered question – what you might call the elephant in the room – one of life’s great mysteries.

I asked Laura in the 80s, when she might have been in a position to know (given that she told me she’d lost her virginity to Billy) and she said they never. But then would Billy have told her? Would Rachel have told her? There was some weird shit going down in the early 80s between that lot, but you’ll have to wait to find out more about that. We’re still in the 70s.

Punk had a special significance in our school after that. So when Scooby started to stick nappy pins through his cheeks we laughed ourselves sick but felt sorry for him all the same. It was a hell of a way to try and be ‘cool’. I just had to endure the duffle coat. He had to stick pins in himself to get noticed.

After the ‘event’, the Italian café took on even greater significance for Billy and Rachel. They’d made up after their London disagreement of course – mostly because their parents wanted to keep them apart. Nothing is more likely to keep a teenage relationship going than parental disapproval, right? Finally it was realised that making a Romeo and Juliet out of them would only backfire and so they were allowed ‘out’, but not allowed to be alone with each other. That’s how we were recruited as chaperones. Laura and Grant were the key ones, of course, but where Laura went I went, so I got in on the act too. I even got to know Grant quite well. I thought he was quite nice, and he flattered me a bit, or I thought he did – but he wasn’t Billy, so I wasn’t really interested. Billy was the object of all our affections back then.

To keep the parents sweet we all hung out at the Italian Café. In reality this meant Laura, Grant and me at one table, Rachel and Billy at another. Stevie managed to get in on the act for a while as he made the biggest fist known to man of trying to get off with Laura. She played hard to get like nobody’s business. Grant played the protective older brother – so far. Then he realised that if Laura hooked up with Stevie he stood more of a chance with me. Which he seemed to want. I went along with it, but to my shame I always had one eye over my shoulder watching Billy. Then, when Laura dumped Stevie – as was inevitable – we hung out as a threesome again (which I was quite glad about) until just before the Christmas holidays when in a completely unexpected move, she got off with Scooby.

We frequented the Italian Café whenever we could at lunchtimes – spending the money our parents believed was going on school dinners on cokes and chips and feeding the coins into the juke box. But that wasn’t enough for Billy and Rachel. On a Tuesday Rachel had a double free period at the same time Billy had French. We got split in French for those periods alternating one week with the ‘French assistant’ and the other week in the language labs. With the help of the rest of us Billy managed to convince each teacher that he was in the other’s class for the whole term. And so Billy and Rachel spent each Tuesday afternoon at the Italian café, feeding the jukebox. We’d come in after school and Toni would say ‘don’t put that Maggie May on again – I’ll give you free plays if you play anything but Rod Stewart.’

I’ve already said that no one mentioned sex. The subject seemed to have been banned even from Social Education where they decided it was more important to teach us how to manage our finances. It wasn’t so much that they stopped talking about sex, it was that they OBVIOUSLY stopped talking about sex. It seemed a bit like locking the stable door after the horse had bolted. No one wanted to face up to the possibility that Billy and Rachel might have ‘done it’. And that there was nothing that could be done if they had. So, into denial all round. Why couldn’t they just be sensible about it? I mean, what were the chances that Billy and Rachel had sex in London? They didn’t have money for a hotel and they were in public spaces in London the whole time – how and when exactly would the opportunity have arisen?

But it did cast a long shadow over school that autumn term. The whole tone from the teachers was ‘they’ve spoiled it for everyone’. You know that ‘not angry, disappointed’ gig which is so much more painful than the Lochgelly tawse ever was. And the teachers went into overdrive to make sure that everything we cared about was spoiled. They hoped we’d blame Billy and Rachel, but of course we blamed them.

School discos were patrolled much more carefully. If you looked like you were about to get off with someone there was invariably a teacher (invariably embarrassed) popping up to divert your attentions. For me, it meant that Grant wasn’t allowed to come to the discos – which he kept threatening to do but which I was quite pleased about – and I was able to fend off the boys in my year by telling them I was going out with a boy at another school. An older boy. I may have invented a car or a motorbike for him – I don’t like to think about the lies I told to counter the embarrassment of the duffle coat.

We were all still under lockdown following the running away romance and so the 1976 Halloween Disco was lame. The only songs I remembered were Joan Armatrading – Love and Affection and Bonnie Tyler – Lost in France. They were the only ones I got a dance with a boy. One was with Stevie, who kept me at arm’s length, and one was with a boy called Oscar who was in my French class. They both tried to kiss me. I fended both off. I was ‘saving’ myself for Billy.

But the Christmas School Disco was the highlight of the calendar. And no teacher was going to spoil that for us. Being Christmas of course there was rather a lot of slow dancing songs. Chicago’s If you leave me now is the one that sticks out. I remember Doobs and Scooby dancing to Under the Moon of Love by Showaddywaddy, just before Laura lost her mind and got off with him. The teachers were trying, but failing miserably to steer clear of the slow dances. We got Leo Sayer You make me feel like dancing and of course endless Abba! You’d have thought Fernando was a boy in our class. Then there was Electric Light Orchestra and of course the usual punishment at the end of the night – Free Bird by Lynrd Skynyrd.

But the night was special for something more than the Laura scandal. I remember every little moment of that evening and mostly what I remember was watching Billy and Rachel being watched by the teachers until Billy came and danced with me.

Someone slipped up on the turntable and before we knew it there was a David Soul song Don’t give up on us baby playing. I didn’t know then but Billy and Rachel had made a pact not to dance the slow dances together. Throwing the authorities off the scent. Not spoiling it for the rest of us. So Rachel sat it out and Billy made my night. Even though I didn’t know about the pact, I knew he was doing it as a ‘diversion’ but still, it remained (if I’m honest, it remains) a highlight of my life. ‘This one’s for Chemistry’ he said as he took me in his arms, not too close, but close enough. It was Chemistry all right.

‘Happy Christmas, Janie,’ he said to me when the song was finished. I was speechless. I knew there was no way he’d kiss me, but I so wished he would.

It was during that dance that someone noticed the teacher in charge of the turntable had snuck out for a fly fag. He’d put on American Pie before he left, hoping that would buy him sometime. Before he came back, Stevie stepped in and played 10CC’s The Things we do for love followed by Queen’s Somebody to Love before he was forcibly removed. The teacher fought back with horror of horrors, Tina Charles. But I was past caring. I’d danced with Billy McGinley. It was Christmas, I was about to turn sixteen and life could only get better. Unless you were Laura. The mistake with Scooby was bound to end in disaster.

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About the Author

​Annie Christie is a pretty ordinary person, except that she was born Annie Christie and then married a man called Christie and so is still called Christie despite having taken on her husband’s name. She sometimes wonders if she should have called herself Christie-Christie: but who would believe that?

Born near Drum of Wartle in Aberdeenshire, Annie moved as swiftly as possible to a place with a less bizarre name – Edinburgh – but the bizarreness chased her and she now lives with her husband Rab in rural Galloway, with a Kirkcudbrightshire postcode. (That's Cur coo bree shire to the uninitiated.) She is an active member of the Infinite Jigsaw Project.

The Soundtrack of Our Lives is Annie's fourth McSerial written for McStorytellers.